Some thirty experts in databases and librarianship met at an ERCIM-sponsored workshop on interoperability and metadata that took place 7-8 October 1996 in Bad Honnef, near Bonn, Germany. The workshop was organized by Thomas Baker of the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD) as the second in a series of workshops on strategic issues for the DELOS Working Group, a European Union-sponsored initiative of the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics (ERCIM), University of Michigan, and Elsevier. The goal was to bring together diverse communities oriented to "interoperability" (database experts) and "metadata" (more library scientists) in order to identify objectives held in common, though couched perhaps in different terms.
The Dublin Core -- a simple but extensible set of descriptive metadata elements -- was discussed both by its designers and by several German organizations currently using it to catalog Web materials. Researchers described how "thesauri" or "ontologies" or "attribute models" or "inheritance hierarchies of attributes" could be used to generate "asset models" or "conspectuses" for use by intelligent agents or in middleware. Of particular interest was the Warwick Framework for managing diverse metadata sets as packages within containers. Other speakers related these issues to catalog convergence among European national libraries, metadata of hypertext links, integrating text and relational databases, Z39.50, and payment schemes.
The workshop Web page, which includes a list of attendees, position papers, and links to related articles and Web sites, can be found at the Web site of the ERCIM Digital Library Initiative. A brief summary of the workshop will appear in issue 28 of ERCIM News.
The Cornell University Library Department of Preservation and Conservation held its seventh digital imaging workshop, October 13-18, 1996. The class of sixteen included librarians, archivists, records managers, and service bureau representatives from the United States and Australia. Participants convened in Ithaca, New York for theoretical and technical overviews to access, quality, and cost issues associated with the digital reformatting of library and archival materials.
The Cornell workshop emphasizes a managerial approach to imaging, and seeks to provide information managers with decision-making approaches to create, manage, and make available digital collections of long-term value. The curriculum combines lectures, discussion, and hands-on training in directed labs. Benchmarking image quality, vendor relations and RFP development, and hybrid approaches to imaging were among the specialized topics discussed. Carl Lagoze led the session on organizing and indexing digital objects, and James Reilly addressed issues associated with scanning photographs.
Throughout the week, participants worked with sample documents representing the wide range of materials in libraries and archives. In their final reports, each group emphasized that digital imaging projects are acts of collaboration. Making decisions about selection, reformatting, and access requires negotiation, and no single approach brings multiple parties into easy agreement. The organizers of the Cornell workshop hope that the "alumni" who go on to initiate their own projects will continue these discussions in a number of forums, and participate in collective efforts to adopt standards and best practices for digital library development.
For further information about the Cornell workshop series, contact Anne R. Kenney, Associate Director of the Department of Preservation and Conservation ark3@cornell.edu.
A new professional journal has been established to address a much-expressed need to make scholarly research on Internet organization and access more easily available. Co-edited by Dr. Ruth Carter of the University of Pittsburgh and Roger Brisson of the Pennsylvania State University, The Journal of Internet Cataloging: The International Quarterly of Digital Organization, Classification and Access (JIC) will begin official publication early next year.
In recognizing the need for enhancing the accessibility of Internet resources, JIC will include research on traditional library techniques and procedures for bibliographical control and access, as well as reviews of novel methods appropriate for effective digital resource management. A full description of the scope and coverage of JIC and subscription information are available at URL:
2nd ACM International Conference on Digital Libraries Philadelphia, Pennsylvania July 23 - 26, 1997 Call for papers |
http://www.sis.pitt.edu/~diglib97/ |
16th Annual Minnesota State, Local Government and Education Computer and Information Management Symposium |
http://www.state.mn.us/ebranch/admin/iisac/conf/comsym96.html |
American Anthropological Association and Computing Research Association Workshop on Culture, Society, and Advanced Information Technology June 1-2, 1995 Proceedings (Postscript) and Executive Summary |
http://cra.org/Reports/Aspects/ |
Canadian Government Information Locator Service (GILS) Pilot Project |
http://gils.gc.ca/ |
Charles H. Bailey Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography |
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html. |
Digitization Activities at the National Library of Canada-Bibliotheque nationale du canada |
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/digiproj/edigiact.htm |
ERCIM, Special issue on digital libraries Digital Libraries site |
http://www-
ercim.inria.fr/publication/Ercim_News/en.html http://www.area.pi.cnr.it/ErcimDL/ |
ICSU/UNESCO Conference Electronic Publishing in Science Proceedings |
http://www.thomson.com:8866/icsu/Informati on/icsu.html |
IMAGES 1: The National Library of Australia's Documentary Images |
http://www2.nla.gov.au/imagecoll// |
Jack London Collection Berkeley Digital Library SunSITE (tm) |
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/London/ |
Journal of Internet Cataloging: The International Quarterly of Digital Organization, Classification and Access (JIC) |
http://jic.libraries.psu.edu |
Learning to Live with E-Journals: Some Practical Solutions November 21, 1996 |
http://epip.lboro.ac.uk/uksg/hi/diary.htm. |
Licensing Electronic Resources: The State of the Evolving Art December 8-9, 1996 |
http://arl.cni.org/scomm/licpr.html. |
SIGIR-96 Workshop on Networked Information Retrieval | http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/nir96 |
hdl:cnri.dlib/november96-clips